Free A Ship Made of Paper by Scott Spencer Page B

might be no better hidden than an ostrich with its head in the sand and fat feathered ass in the air.
    “Why don’t we split the day, then?” he says. “All I need is two or three hours. I can take them now or I can take them in the afternoon. Or I can take them at night, for that matter.” It really doesn’t matter. All he needs is to get out of this house for a couple of hours. But as soon as that thought crosses his mind, it is replaced by a second, more urgent idea.
    He should go first, then Kate could work in the afternoon, and then he could take more time away in the evening. That way he could have as a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
    many as six hours. To do what? That part hasn’t been worked out yet. To cruise by Iris’s house? To patrol the village in search of her car? To sit at his desk dialing and redialing her number?
    “All right,” Kate says, her voice measured, a little cool. “Then you go first.” He knows she is onto him. He can feel the pressure of her intelligence and her deep common sense. He feels like a half-wit miscreant tracked by a master sleuth.
    His sense of impending exposure quickens his pace, and in minutes he is out of the house, in his car, and on his way to somewhere or other.
    From the house on Willow Lane to his office in the middle of town is a ten-minute drive and one that could, without any loss of travel efficiency, bring him past Iris’s house, if he should choose to take that route, which he does.
    The Saturday has turned warm; it’s already October, winter is next.
    Daniel drives past the familiar landmarks of his childhood. Putnam Lake, with little puckers of silvery light caught in its waves, ringed by tall blue spruce; Livingston High School, surrounded by cornfields, its asphalt parking lot in the process of receiving freshly painted yellow lines; the infamous ranch house where his old friend Richard Taylor lived with his drunken parents, where you could walk right in without knocking, where there was no housekeeping, no food, no supervision, where the lamps did not have shades, and where Daniel drank his first whiskey when he was eleven years old, smoked his first joint at twelve, and, that same year, got into a ferocious fist fight with Richard’s deaf older cousin.
    The Taylor place was one of a dozen houses around Leyden where Daniel spent his time after school, where he slept on weekends, where he hid like a little desperado. In those grim but somehow fondly remembered childhood days—when he was his own man, needed by no one, responsible to no one, when the unanimous possession of his self was a pleasure that outflanked every deprivation and annoyance—he would rather have been anywhere in the known world than in his own home. He would rather have slept in school than in his parents’ house.
    His parents were latecomers to parenthood, vegetarians, Congrega-
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    tionalists, campers, tall gray people with solitary tastes for reading, hik-ing, and the brewing of homemade beer. They were in their forties when Daniel was born, and by the time he was a teenager they were nearly sixty, their habits thoroughly calcified. The foods they liked, the Mozart that soothed them, their ten o’clock bedtime and their six-forty-five rising, their hour-long ablutions, their Canadian Air Force exercises, their aversion to moving air (no air conditioners, no fans), their daily porch sweeping, their dishes, cups, and silverware cleaned in kettles of boiling water—these were the things that Julia and Carl Emerson revered.These were, in their minds, the cornerstones not only of civilization but of sanity; without them they would be plunged into madness.
    When Daniel entered their lives they taught him not to touch the vases, which antique carpets to avoid, which lamps were safe to use. He was not to run, jump, or shout. He was not to play the stereo console in their parlor, nor was he to use the electric typewriter, the adding machine, the juicer, the blender, either of the